Customer contact centers, also herein called call centers, provide an important interface for customers/partners of an organization to contact the organization. The contact can be for a request for a product or service, for trouble reporting, service request, etc. The contact mechanism in a typical call center is via a telephone, but it could be via a number of other electronic channels, including e-mail, etc.
The typical contact center consists of a number of human agents, with each assigned to a telecommunication device, such as a phone or a computer for conducting email or Internet chat sessions, that is connected to a central switch. Using these devices, the agents are generally used to provide sales, customer service, or technical support to the customers or prospective customers of a contact center or a contact center's clients.
Typically, a contact center or client will advertise to its customers, prospective customers, or other third parties a number of different contact numbers or addresses for a particular service, such as for sales, for billing questions, or for technical support. The customers, prospective customers, or third parties seeking a particular service will then use this contact information, and the incoming caller will be routed at one or more routing points to a human agent at a contact center who can provide the appropriate service. Contact centers that respond to such incoming contacts are typically referred to as “inbound contact centers.”
Conventionally, a contact center operation includes a switch system that connects callers to agents. In an inbound contact center, these switches route incoming callers to a particular agent in a contact center, or, if multiple contact centers are deployed, to a particular contact center for further routing. When a call lands at a contact center (which can be physically distributed, i.e., the agents may or may not be on a single physical location), it important to route the call to an appropriate call agent, and also to provide call agents with information that will enable the agent to handle the call more effectively.
In an example of conventional methods for routing an inbound call, if there are eight agents at a contact center, and seven are occupied with contacts, the switch will generally route the inbound caller to the one agent that is available. If all eight agents are occupied with contacts, the switch will typically put the contact on hold and then route it to the next agent that becomes available. More generally, the contact center will set up a queue of incoming callers and preferentially route the longest-waiting callers to the agents that become available over time. Such a pattern of routing contacts to either the first available agent or the longest-waiting agent is sometimes referred to as “round-robin” contact routing. In round-robin contact routing, eventual matches and connections between a caller and an agent are essentially random.
Some attempts have been made to improve upon these standard yet essentially random processes for connecting a caller to an agent. In some customer contact systems, calls are distributed based on static attributes of the caller (e.g., customer identifier), type of problem (typically obtained by prompting the caller to interact with the IVR system) and capability profile of the agents. Conventional contact center systems make only limited use of dynamic, time-dependent attributes used in agent selection, such as traffic parameters (load on an agent, time of day etc.), information on agent performance, or dynamic information on customers. The call assignment process typically is not informed by prior experiences the same or similar customers had with the same or similar agents.